


Iron Maiden

by scarredsodeep



Series: Iron Maiden [1]
Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: Action, Bisexual Disaster Tony Stark, Bisexual Tony Stark, F/F, F/M, Female Tony Stark, Femslash, Femslash February, Gen, Genderbending, Homage to the comics, Iron Man 1, Kidnapping, Marvel Universe, Recovery, Retelling, Sexual assault mentioned, Superheroes, Trauma, and becoming a superhero, and being underestimated because of your gender, but it's about relationship, gender rage, this is not actually a love story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-12 05:33:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29379996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: When Tony's kidnapped in the desert, she saves herself. Next, she'll save the world.(A retelling of Iron Man 1 if Tony Stark was a woman.)
Relationships: James "Rhodey" Rhodes/Tony Stark, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark
Series: Iron Maiden [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2158206
Comments: 2
Kudos: 28
Collections: Femslash February





	1. prelude

**Author's Note:**

> FRIENDS! This was an incredibly fun piece to write. You know how much I love Iron Man and how ardently I refuse to apologize for it. This year, for Fem Feb / Valentine's Day, we have a story that's not really a romance. It's about trauma and recovery, becoming a goddamn superhero because you're tired of being told what girls can't do, of disappointing your parents and saving yourself, of building a better legacy and showing the world what women can do (kind of). It is intended to be a 3 part series; part 2 is currently in the works, but this work stands on its own and is complete. Let me know what this Tony makes you think and feel! I hope it brings you the same joy and rage it brought me.
> 
> Content Warning: sexual assault is discussed angrily, and there's a lot of nonspecific girl trauma.
> 
> [companion playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0tYz0y8nZiu1iq97rDQJN5?si=878dd359291c4c91)

Maybe this is where it starts.

Maybe Howard held out hope until the bitter end, the man of science turning to faith, that his legacy would show up in the delivery room if not on the sonograms. Maybe that’s why he looks disappointed in all her memories of him, even in the faded snapshot where he’s scrubbed up for the OR, holding a tiny swaddled bundle with a screwed-up face, his same dark hair, and a pink hat. The first appearance of Antonia Stark, and already Howard can’t hide his disappointment.

_It’s a girl._

Howard’s crumpled fist, a smashed cigar. Fret etched into his forehead, face remade by the arrival of an unending frown. A joyous occasion, isn’t it? The birth of a child? But Tony comes into the world like an apology. 

The nickname Tony is instant, because honestly _Antonia_ is a mouthful, because its short form and masculine spelling does not designate gender. For a while the Stark household gets by on it, dressing the baby in yellows, greys, greens, short dark hair and brightest-blue eyes, like the birth announcement is the only time anyone has to acknowledge—

_It’s a girl._

Howard isn’t a bad guy; that would have been too easy. It’s in the small things, the barely imperceptible disapprovals that tighten his frown day by day like a hex key. It’s the last time she wears a dress in front of him. She’s six, and it’s a cupcake of a thing, all ribbons and ruffles and hand-stitched spangles. She feels like a princess, and Howard crouches down to regard her at eye level and says, “You look beautiful, darling.” But his eyes never stop frowning, no matter what shapes his mouth makes. And at the banquet he keeps his hand on her shoulder, fingers tight, and he glowers at all who approach. He murmurs, to her or to himself, “You must never let anyone think of you as something they can possess.” Even at six she understands: a man marries to ensure his legacy, but a woman marries to create the legacy of a man. She is a Stark, her own and only hers. So the next time her mother puts a party dress out for her, she says, “I don’t like dresses anymore.” Maria isn’t about to let a thing like that come between her and her drinking, so she merely says to her wine glass, “Whatever you like, dear,” and lets Tony choose pants. 

Or: It’s the last time she plays with dolls, a rare moment when Howard sits on the floor beside her, his callused hands enormous next to hers and his forearms spotted with engine grease, and grips the father doll tightly. He removes the doll from the dollhouse and turns it over in his hands, as if to wonder what a father could possibly be doing at home with his family instead of at work, changing the world by making it worse, more efficient weapons meaning less cost per corpse, lessening the environmental impact of manufacturing death. “You will always have to work twice as hard as anyone else,” Howard tells her. _As the boys_ goes unsaid. “Let’s go down to the workshop. Maybe we can build a better dollhouse.” Howard takes toys from her hands, replaces them with tools. Wiring, circuits, metal sheeting, iron shears, a welding torch: what they build is never really meant to be a dollhouse. After that, Tony prefers workshop to playroom, making real things with her hands to pretending with plastic. And Howard makes a new face at her then, like he recognizes himself at last. Tony reorganizes herself around that feeling.

She feels it when she informs her teacher that the first grade robotics curriculum is entirely lacking (everyone else is tracing alphabet letters in shaving cream). She’s taken out of school and put into private lessons at home, with the finest engineers and astrophysicists and metallurgists Howard can find. She feels it when she builds a tiny generator, powered by her hamster’s revolutions on his wheel, so she can power a light under the covers after bedtime. She feels it when she shows him the first rocket she ever designs, before her age is in double digits, and when she explains the precision targeting program she’s writing to go with it. She feels it every time someone’s forced to tell her she’s done well and doesn’t add, _for a girl_.

For a long time, she’s just Tony. Hardly a girl at all, and when she has to be, she’s sorry about it. She grows up doing everything she can think of to make it up to dear old Dad. Takes after him in any way she can, engineering weapons on napkins, diagramming chemical reactions along the margins of her coloring pages, studying the aerodynamics of toy planes, sneaking into Howard’s workshop to play Dad, to play boy, to play god.

Puberty betrays everyone, but it hits Tony especially hard. Howard’s never really stopped frowning since she was born, but at least she could sometimes make his eyes gleam proud, like when she finished high school coursework before her boobs grew in. She does whatever she can to hide it, the way her shape is changing, the way her face lengthens and sheds the ungendered pudge of youth, the blood on her bedsheets no one’s looking for. She keeps her hair short, no longer than the ends of her ears, keeps her clothes baggy and plain. It seems like maybe she’ll get away with it, like maybe the kingdom will still be hers to inherit, like maybe she’ll never have to admit

_it’s a girl._

And if that’s the first thing the terrorists say, twenty years later, when they pull the bag off of her head at her own kidnapping—well, fuck them, right? Fuck terrorists in general? And if it’s the first thing Ho Yinsen ever says to her, “The Stark girl? You are the last person I expected to meet here,” then at least her dad wasn’t alive to hear it.

Because she’s tried her whole life not to be, not in any way that matters, not in any way that tarnishes the Stark sovereignty. And it’s still the first-and-only fucking thing about her anyone ever has to say. At her birth, at her kidnapping, at every moment in between.

_It’s a girl girl girl girl girl_

After a lifetime of that.

Tony doesn’t need to build a bomb to make things explode.

Tony becomes the explosion.


	2. that’s how dad did it, that’s how america does it, and it’s worked out pretty well so far

She hired Virgina Potts because she’s the kind of person Tony always wanted to be. Not that it does her a lot of good _now_ , with Pepper up her ass from sunup to sundown about deadlines, meetings, papers, paintings, _and so on_ , but there was a time when she couldn’t imagine anything better than the company of this pristine woman.

Today what Pepper’s on about is therapy.

“How long have we known each other, Potts?” Tony asks, turning up the speed on her treadmill. Beside her, Pepper’s tapping away on a tablet, skin dew-kissed with sweat, walking a slow steady incline in the white workout gear / perky pony combo of a terrifyingly formidable woman.

“Too long,” Pepper says crisply. She flicks her tablet screen onto Jarvis’s augmented holo display, and a string of smiling therapists begin appearing in Tony’s eyeline. She looks down, fusses with her treadmill controls. “Tony, it’s been two months since we got you back from the desert. You’ve got to need therapy. I mean, do you know how much therapy _I’ve_ had to do about it?”

“Really making me reconsider your benefits package, Pep,” Tony pants. The treadmill whines, angling her uphill. She has the vague notion that if she cardios hard enough, Pepper will have no choice but to go away. Working out is a _health behavior_. It would be hypocritical of someone concerned about her _health_ to ask her to stop. “Why is my resilience up for debate here? If you’ve watched me survive the trauma of my personal life all these years, not to mention becoming the female CEO of a Fortune 500 company at the age of 21—and remind me, why was it I inherited so young again? Oh, right, my parents died—plus, my breakup with that Olsen twin, that was really hard on me—”

“Olsen sister,” Pepper corrects. She’s still flicking through the tablet, disguising her annoyance as boredom. “Neither twin has ever returned your calls.” 

Tony turns her head to scowl at Pepper. Sweat stings into her eyeballs, and she’s getting a serious stitch from talking while running. “The point is, why do you think I’d go to therapy now?”

Pepper throws her hands in the air in exasperation, inadvertently clearing the projected Jarvis display by doing so. (Tony’s so glad she installed that feature.) “For fuck’s sake, Tony, maybe because I care about you?”

“Since when is it ‘Tony’, anyway? Didn’t you used to call me Ms. Stark? That had a nice ring to it, didn’t it? Something almost, I don’t know, cognizant of the chain of command about it?”

Tony doesn’t need to look to see that flash of aquamarine Pepper’s eyes get when she’s truly angry—she memorized it years ago—but she does anyway. Unfortunately for her, Pepper chooses that exact moment to reach over and yank the emergency stop on Tony’s treadmill. Tony slams into the machine on her own momentum and only manages to avoid eating shit by throwing herself bodily over the guardrail, knocking the remaining air out of her lungs and smashing her already tender ribs.

Her ratty Metallica t-shirt flops open as she wheezes in indignant pain, the glow of the arc reactor rising out of her sports bra like a waxing moon. Pepper points at it in distaste, too self-possessed to tremble with anger.

“You come back home with that _thing_ in your chest, won’t tell anyone what you’re doing or what they did to you in there, asking _me_ to cancel all your commitments and represent you to the press so you can disappear into your garage to work on your secret projects, while you rely on Obadiah Stone to oversee a complete overhaul of your company and empty case after case of very nice wine on your own at night, and expect me not to notice you’re covered in _bandages_ from mysterious injuries all the time—and you want to talk about what I call you? Because I have some ideas, Ms. Stark, some really choice names I wouldn’t mind trying out—”

God, Tony loves this woman, especially when she’s pissed off. “You’re right,” she breaks in, gentle as a bull in a china shop, which is still pretty gentle for Tony. 

Pepper blinks in alarm. Of all the things Tony Stark is capable of saying at any given time, _you’re right_ is somehow the most shocking. “I’m right?”

“Absolutely. I should promote you.”

“Promote me—? Tony—”

“No, listen to me. You’re brilliant and capable and seriously gorgeous, by the way—not harassment, just a hazard of having those abs out in front of me, not even getting into your bone structure situation—”

“Tony—”

“Obadiah is a snake. We both know it. So you’re right. If you’re going to be the face and the responsibilities of Tony Stark, you need the title and authority to go with it.”

“Tony, no. I’m trying to say _no_.”

“It’s already done. I’ll draw up the papers. I’ll have Jarvis draw up the papers. And hey—maybe I’ll use my new free time to go see a therapist. Win-win-win, right? At least three wins.”

Pepper does that cute goldfish thing where her mouth flops open and closed, open and closed. Tony hops off her treadmill with a grin, trying to keep the wince off her face as her ribs grind together unfavorably. “Good talk, Potts. Seriously, I feel great. Maybe _you_ should be a therapist. I feel great!” The last she shouts back over her shoulder on her way out of the gym. She tousles a towel through her cropped hair to absorb sweat as she heads for her workshop, the locked room where she keeps the things she’ll never tell Pepper about. Her secret project, her vision of the world’s salvation, her plan to right the bloody wrong of her family’s legacy. Because she doesn’t need therapy. All Tony needs, all that matters anymore, is the next mission. The Iron Man. 

▼

It’s only when she’s alone with him that Tony can really relax. She strips down to her undershirt and overpriced underwear and throws on her jumpsuit, tying the sleeves around her waist instead of zipping up. It’s grease-stained, machine-chewed, spark-singed—practical. You need something to protect your day clothes when you can’t leave the house without a reporter asking _who are you wearing_ , publishing speculation as to whether you’re on another bender when you can’t answer. She’s a media darling right now, what with the ‘kidnapped white woman’ bit, but the public’s goodwill won’t last. It never does.

Dressed, then, for the job, she sets herself to taking her red-and-gold knight to pieces. There’s a secret about what happened in Afghanistan, you see. No one saved Tony. No one has ever saved Tony. And now? Now she’ll never need saving again.

She’s been over every inch of him, at this point. He’s perfect as a mark 1 can be, and he’ll look much better in the papers than she ever did. Still, she hesitates. The suit’s been ready for a week. She’s stalling, scared of what will happen when she steps inside.

Imagine what it must be like, to have everything in the world and still somehow be nothing. To have an accident of birth strip you of all value but your name. To be forced to prove, day after day after day, that you have a brain riding around above your body. That you look better in a boardroom than a bedroom. To never have any power at all, to the point where some _jackass_ thinks he can capture you to use as a political prisoner to get nuclear missiles delivered by some other person of consequence, some other man. To have to convince your captors _you_ are the golden goose, that if they give you enough palladium you’ll start laying golden eggs.

Imagine being able to be anyone you wanted to be, because it doesn’t matter, because you’re not a man.

Tony’s afraid she’ll step into that suit and never come out again. Tony’s afraid she’ll take her peacekeeper, her end of all war, her nuclear deterrent, and use it to burn the whole fucking world to the ground. Remind them of Tiamat, mother of gods and monsters. Remind them that just as she creates, woman always, always destroys.

Tony doesn’t notice she initiated the armor sequence til Jarvis’s cool voice slips through her cloud of rage. “The faceplate, Ms. Stark?” he prompts.

Because Tony’s already wearing the rest of the suit. It fits like a second skin, a better skin, one that doesn’t feel like a liability. It holds her effortlessly, like sitting in the hand of god. It coils and curls with its own power, with _her_ power. She has goosebumps, or maybe those are the biomonitors kissing her skin. She’s ready. She’s not. She swallows, nods for Jarvis to continue, and tries not to think of the bag over her head, the darkness swallowing her up, as a robotic arm fits the plate over her face.

It snaps into place and the suit interface lights up, nothing like the bag, nothing like the cave, nothing like her life up to this point—glowing galaxies of possibilities. Like the night sky. Her eyes glitter with reflected light, or else glow with the source of it.

“Congratulations, Ms. Stark. The mark 1 is online.”

Tony flexes her fingers, shapes iron gauntlets into fists capable of punching at 10,000 Newtons. She feels her face stretch in a savage grin. “Enough standing around,” she says, and Iron Man’s modulated voice fills the air. “I built this thing to fly.”

▼

For the first few weeks, testing the suit’s capabilities— _her_ capabilities—and revising the design take up all of her time. Including time she promised elsewhere—it’s fine. She assumes Pepper’s handling it. She’s never created any fuck-up so major Pepper couldn’t handle it.

She breaks the ceiling, a little. And the two smallest fingers of her left hand. She starts many, many small fires with the suit’s thrusters, and one not insignificant blaze with the chest repulsor cannon. Honestly, she’d sleep in the suit if she trusted her nightmares not to activate anything dire: she’s more comfortable wrapped in a womb of iron, sensors, and stiff padding than she’s ever been before. Certainly more comfortable than she’s been since Afghanistan. She won’t admit it, but she’s been dying to get back into an Iron Man since she first nearly died in one, since she cobbled together the prototype with Yinsen in that cave and felt its cold embrace. Now that she’s got a shiny one, powered by an arc reactor that can run the suit _and_ her heart—shit. She’s never taking it off.

The suit’s cleared basic safety and stress testing and is ready for its first field test when Pepper shows up to cause problems. Tony really, really doesn’t want to give up a night in the suit, but she wants Pepper to catch her in it even less, and she knows the woman’s only ever three straight-to-voicemails away from breaking down Tony’s door. So she has Jarvis route the third call into her helmet and picks up.

“Stark residence. May I ask who’s calling?”

Pepper’s irritation is not any less scary from inside a million dollar superpowered armor suit. “Do you know what today was, Tony?”

Tony, truly, does not. “It’s Wednesday, ma’am,” Jarvis chimes privately in her ear.

“Hell. It’s not your birthday again, is it? Or, no—not Administrative Professionals’ Day?” she guesses wildly. 

“Per the paperwork you sent over, I’m no longer your administrative professional, but thanks,” Pepper snaps. “Today was the board meeting. That you promised you’d be at. In order to reassure our panicking shareholders that there’s still a Stark at Stark Industries, not just a Stane and a Potts.”

“I’m sorry, Pep, I—”

“Oh no you don’t. No _sorry_ s. No _I forgot_. This is the third meeting you’ve blown off. Not even getting into how bad it makes _me_ look, guaranteeing you’ll be there and then making apologies when you are clearly not, but think about how it makes _you_ look. Unreliable, emotional, compromised—”

“I’m eccentric, I’ve always been—”

“Only men get to be eccentric. For women it’s hysterical, traumatized, weak. These people haven’t even seen your face since—since we got you back.”

“I’ll make it up to you, Pepper, you know I will,” Tony tries, hoping any part of it is true. She should be worried, she knows it. But her heart doesn’t even speed up. It’s hard to see any of this as a problem that can touch her: nothing can touch her when she’s iron. 

“You won’t. I’m trying to tell you it’s too late—Obadiah’s made his move against you. There’s going to be a vote.”

Okay, this is starting to sound serious. “A vote? I put you there so there _wouldn’t_ be a vote. You’re my, my ambassador. You make me look stable! You are there specifically to prevent coups, Pepper.”

“Well, when you can’t be bothered to show up, I’m also the only woman in the room. They’re voting to resume arms production on Monday. Maybe you’ll be bothered to show up to _that_.”

And Pepper’s so angry with her, she hangs up the phone. There’s only one thing Tony can do in response to that.

She takes off the suit. She grabs a bottle of very nice wine from the cellar. She drives to Pepper’s house.

▼

“That,” Pepper greets her, swinging open the door, “is not nearly enough wine.”

Pepper’s in a big Smith College sweatshirt over leggings, her hair in a messy bun. She takes the wine out of Tony’s hands and there’s a moment there where she’s plainly considering slamming the door in Tony’s face. Instead she turns and vanishes into the apartment. Tony invites herself in, follows in Pepper’s bare footsteps. There’s a moment, in the kitchen—Pepper looking so unpolished and young, Tony in whatever ratty jeans were in her workshop, a tank top, a motorcycle jacket, leaning in the doorframe—she can feel that magnetic thread stretch between them, humming with tension. Like old times.

Pepper’s holding a glass of Chardonnay—and _glass_ is generous, it’s about a third of the bottle—up to her lips, like maybe she’s not going to offer Tony one, like maybe she’s going to ask Tony to leave. She sighs, sets down her glass untouched, and breaks the taut thread by pouring another.

“Here,” Pepper relents, handing out the second, significantly less full, glass. “I can’t believe _this_ is what you show up here for.”

“I care about my girl Friday a lot more than I care about the board,” Tony says. “C’mon. Don’t be mad. Does me showing up really surprise you?”

Pepper takes what can only be described as a gulp of Chardonnay. “I don’t think I’m capable of being surprised by you anymore,” she says levelly, and it’s not playful. It’s just sad.

“I can think of at least one surprise,” Tony murmurs, mostly flirting, partly considering telling Pepper about Iron Man. 

“Don’t even start,” Pepper warns softly, more to her drink than to anyone.

Tony peels off her jacket, drapes it over one of the stools at the breakfast bar, steps closer. There’s that magnet again—push/pull, the tension of swelling liquid not yet burst, every step closer a choice between colliding and ricocheting apart. Tony can feel the atoms filling the space between them begin to pinwheel. Pepper is very, very close. Pepper’s fingertips extend to float just above Tony’s bared collarbone. “Oh, Tony. What happened to you?”

Honestly, she’d forgotten. Her skin is chafed and indented all over, tiny aches and bruises and calluses in production at sites where the suit is jointed, where gaps appear in the plating, where she’s been pinched or poked or rubbed away by friction. She doesn’t have the chest plate quite right, accounting for breasts on the inside without showing them on the outside. You need the knowledge of a medieval smith combined with a couture designer to get it perfect: no unwieldy weight ready to stave her chest in if breached, but no soft spot either. The suit has left her a delicate necklace of scrapes and little green-blue bruises where her decolletage still bears too much weight. If Pepper thinks her collarbone looks bad, well—below the constant rash itching around the arc reactor, Tony’s tits are black and blue.

Pepper’s hand still hovers, pressing the air, so Tony can almost feel, through the vibrating molecules of atmosphere, the places those fingers would touch—heat rushes to the surface of her skin, blood always quick to burn for Pepper. 

She steps closer, and instead of backing up, Pepper presses her hand against her chest, fingerprint to bruise, using the slightest pressure to halt her.

“Remind me,” Tony rasps, voice suddenly thick and low, “why it’s a bad idea if we—?”

“You know why,” Pepper whispers, but she doesn’t move her hand away, doesn’t stop her thumb from lightly tracing Tony’s bruised collarbone, doesn’t take her forget-me-not eyes off Tony’s mouth. She lets Tony lean closer, angling their bodies together in such a familiar way. She lets their mouths draw close, closer—

Then she says, “Tell me where we’re meant to be tonight and I’ll let you kiss me.”

“We’re meant to be right here,” Tony breathes. It’s a line, but it’s a charming one, they both know it. Tony has a lot of faults but no one’s ever accused her of lacking charm. 

Pepper extends her arm, turning her hand’s gentle pressure into a shove. She spins away from Tony, downs the rest of her wine, and stalks out of the kitchen.

Tony shoots a quick text to her driver to please go buy three more bottles of wine, whatever costs the most at the closest place that sells it, and bring them up to Pepper’s door. Then she follows the redhead who clearly has no intention of ever kissing her again into the living room.

Pepper is curled up on the couch, feet tucked under her, staring at the TV. Tony refills both glasses and notices Pepper’s watching E! coverage of the annual Stark charity gala. Onscreen, Obie dazzles on the red carpet, surrounded by models in disco ball dresses, celebrities of various renown, and the forgettable, healthy faces of L.A.’s wealthiest philanthropists.

“Oh, the gala. When was it?” Tony asks, settling beside Pepper on the couch.

Pepper casts her a dark look. “Right now, Tony. Tonight.”

Tony blinks a few times, trying to fit this information together with Pepper’s obvious anger at her. She wishes Jarvis was here to confirm. She’d feel better if the whole suit was here, really. “I feel like I’m missing something here,” she says slowly. She hates being slow.

Pepper’s nostrils flare in irritation. “You planned to attend this year, Ms. Stark. Your date got a truly remarkable backless gown for the occasion, but somehow she knew better than to put it on tonight after you blew off the board meeting and ignored all her calls.”

Tony admires the elegance of Pepper’s long neck as the other woman empties her wine glass. It’s a reckless pace to drink at, but Tony’s not going to point it out; she’s the #1 beneficiary of Pepper’s recklessness.

“I asked you to go with me,” Tony fills in the blanks, though in truth she barely remembers. The weeks since her return have been a nightmare blur of fear, sleepless nights, alcohol, and the Iron Man. “As my date. And against your better judgment, you actually accepted.”

“You really are a genius,” Pepper says dryly, staring at the television screen.

How many times can you use the same apology for fucking things up with the same person? Tony doesn’t want to chance it. She twirls her wine glass by the stem, bites her lower lip. “So when you said I couldn’t surprise you anymore…”

“Bingo,” says Pepper. She holds out her glass wordlessly. Tony pours.

“So… wanna get drunk tonight instead?”

“Salud,” mutters Pepper, making no move to toast. Tony scoots a little closer, and Pepper doesn’t move away, so she figures she may as well be grateful for it.

Soon Happy will bring up more wine. Tony will tolerate his and Pepper’s flirting. Wine will flow, Pepper will thaw, and if she’s lucky, Pepper will tell her to send Happy home alone and let Tony crawl into her bed, flushed and clumsy, and say it’s for the last time. It won’t be the last time. By sunrise, Tony will be forgiven, or as close to forgiven as she ever comes.

Except Pepper changes the channel. The room fills with gunshots, rapidly spoken Pashto, screams. Tony smells smoke and damp and blood, Yinsen’s blood, even though that’s impossible. Beneath her feet, Pepper’s white plush rug churns black with oil and corrupted blood. She blinks hard to clear her vision. Instead of the Stark gala, a breaking news report: a terrorist strike in Gulmira, says intrepid reporter on the scene. The cameras zoom in, drone footage of weapons crates. The logo is unmistakable. Tony designed it herself, in the re-branding after her parents died. It’s Stark tech, Stark weapons of mass destruction, the kind she stopped her company selling when she came _back_ from the fucking desert, the kind she swore would never get into the wrong hands again, the kind she built the Iron Man to deter and replace, the kind of death incarnate she has made it her _mission_ to _eradicate_ —

“Tony? Tony, are you—”

But Tony can’t hear her. It’s all ringing in her ears, screams gunshots Yinsen her own begging, the way everything echoed-then-stopped in those caves. Fire. The cleansing roar of fire.

“I have to go,” she says, or thinks she says, through numb lips. Happy isn’t back yet but that’s fine, it’s all fine, there’s an Uber in under two minutes because this is Los Angeles, and she gets in the car, and she goes home, and she doesn’t take a single breath from the time she sees that fuzzy logo in the background shadows of the Gulmira footage until the faceplate closes out the world and locks her into her suit. Because time has stopped. Because it’s happening again. Because she’s not in control.

Because Iron Man can fix all of this. Tony Stark is powerless, but Iron Man can save the goddamn world.

▼

She puts the suit on autopilot and opens up Jarvis’s web interface, the Stark Industries accounts, the offshore accounts associated with terrorist organizations. She digs through data, follows trails that go cold, and hits against the same walls so many times she begins to see the truth, its shape revealed by an absence of facts.

By the time she lands in Gulmira, she has a pretty good idea of how her weapons got there. Not by accident, to say the least. And she starts to suspect that she didn’t end up in those caves by accident either.

The hydraulic clench and whir of her suit arming brings her back to the moment, to the mission. She streaks over the town from above, scanning. Crates upon crates upon crates of Stark tech, the weeping willow shape of a missile array, and _men_ , pouring over the town like ants with machine guns. The townspeople are gathered, witnesses to be silenced; the able-bodied men have bags over their heads, are being herded into cargo trucks. It reminds her of what she doesn’t remember, of what she _won’t_ remember. Her mouth fills with bitter and salt.

“Jarvis, what happens if I throw up in the suit?” she mutters. She clenches her fists one articulated joint at a time, relishing the tenderness of her bruised knuckles, and tries to feel real. If he answers, she doesn’t hear it. She’s barely here.

Iron Man touches down in Gulmira to gunshots and screams, preceded by a few targeted missiles, taking out an unmanned truck, a stockpile of Stark tech, and half a block of the town. It gets attention is what it does. It gets guns off civilians and pointed at Iron Man, and being so close to death makes Tony Stark feel incredibly, brilliantly _alive_. She’s laughing, someone in the helmet is laughing, and the fear and the pain and the death all around seem so paltry and so feeble and so small. She can end it. With a flick of her targeting computer, she can end it. 

Why did she ever feel afraid?

She gives them a chance to stand down, and the ones who don’t take it, she destroys. Terrorists disarmed, civilians rescued, and she smells the smoke even though the suit’s O2 filtration makes it impossible for any external particles to enter her lungs, she chokes on it, her tongue is coated in metal and blood. When she is done, she stands in a crater of her own creation where the center square of Gulmira once stood, and the people she’s freed don’t cheer for her, they run in fear. Being honest, she doesn’t mind it. Tony is the judge, the jury, and the executioner. Tony is an instrument of peace. Just ask the Old Testament—peace has always been terrifying. Peace has always been paid for with destruction.

She flies home from Gulmira bullet-bruised and half blown-up and grinning so hard her jaw aches. She flies home a hero. As she arcs over the ocean at the speed of sunrise, she slips back into the data. She follows the money til the trails go cold. She hunts for her rogue weapons. She outlines her next mission. Remember: victory is fleeting. The mission is what matters.

▼

“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important,” Tony says, slipping into Pepper’s office and closing the door behind her, hands raised like white flags.

Pepper glares up from her desk. “In my experience you don’t show up then either,” she says coolly. It’s the wrong moment to say so, but inheriting Tony’s kingdom really suits her: she’s dressed all in white, a smart skirt with a billowy silk blouse, and shoes Tony’d have to be drunk to walk in, with that over-severe business ponytail she wears to intimidate short-haired women. She looks freckly and angry and beautiful.

“I’m worried about Obadiah,” Tony says.

“For fuck’s sake!” Pepper shouts in exasperation. It just rips out of her, louder than either of them expected, clearly building for some time. Then, eyes narrowing with concern: “Do you have _new_ bruises? You didn’t have that bruise on your cheek last night. Though you left so quickly, maybe I missed it…” she adds, not without sarcasm.

“Would you believe I’m in a fight club?” Tony cracks. It’s the wrong moment. Pepper’s face shuts back down.

“I’ve been worrying about Obadiah for weeks, Tony, and begging you to take interest in the problem. Why on earth are you bestirring yourself now?”

It’s hard to believe that 24 hours ago Tony thought Pepper might take her to bed. Maybe the last time really _was_ the last time. Tony doesn’t relish the thought. She crosses to Pepper’s desk, passes her a flash drive. “Last night, that broadcast you put on. That terrorist cell with the Stark weapons. It shouldn’t be possible, right? So I started digging.”

Pepper’s immaculate eyebrows climb. “Did you see the news this morning? That terrorist cell was blown up by some kind of unidentified drone. No military’s stepped forward to claim it.”

“Hmm,” Tony says, as if this bores her. “So anyway, I started following the money, and there are inconsistencies in our accounts. Even though I shut down production, components are being paid for, inventory’s going down, machines are running, and then right when you’d expect all that money, labor, parts, to turn into a warhead—it vanishes. Then there are Jericho missile arrays in Afghanistan. Do you see what I’m seeing, Pep? What if the weapons aren’t coming from the black market—what if they’re coming from us?”

Pepper’s tapping a pen against her desk like it wronged her. “Tony—the drone was in your colors.” 

Tony doesn’t mean to. Her fist smashes into the glass top of Pepper’s desk. Coffee splashes up out of Pepper’s mug and she yelps, startled. “ _Fuck_ ,” Tony gasps, pain shooting through her hand. She forgot she wasn’t in the suit, forgot what it feels like to punch something when you’re just flesh and bone. She rubs her hand, tears biting her eyes, and sounds desperate as she says, “Pepper, I just—who cares about a drone? It sounds like it’s on our side. I’m trying to talk about _Stark Industries_ dealing dirty under the table.”

“Our _side_? Tony, what are you even saying? What sides? This isn’t a war!”

How can she be so willfully blind? Tony’s face feels hot, the blood in her bruises throbbing like they’re going to burst. She’s not listening, she’s decided not to listen. Tony has to do this on her own, Tony has to do everything on her own.

She’s pointing at Pepper, a shaking violent finger, and she knows it’s not helping her cause but she can’t lower her hand anymore than she can lower her voice. “War is exactly what this is!” she’s yelling. “Wake up, Pepper! If you don’t take care of Obadiah, _I will_. People are dying because of _me_ , because of _my father_ , because of _my weapons_. I’m going to stop it, Pepper. No matter what it takes.”

“You’re scaring me,” Pepper whispers.

Tony feels ready to dismantle the world with her own two hands. She’s more rage than sleep, more violence than peace. If she had her suit on, she’d—

She collapses into the chair across from Pepper. She feels scraped out, and tired, and sad. If she had her suit on she’d tear this office apart and forget that Pepper’s not her enemy. If she had her suit on she would be the war.

“I’m sorry,” she says to her hands, trembling in her lap. “I—I’ve been having pretty bad dreams. I think I need some sleep.”

Pepper comes around the desk, kneels beside Tony’s chair, puts her hands over Tony’s hand and tries to catch her eye. “Please, Tony. Tell me it wasn’t you.”

“All the data you should need is on the drive,” Tony says. Her voice sounds mechanical and far away. “Force Obie out. He can either retire or I’ll make him retire. There’s enough on here to string him up on conspiracy to kidnap charges, on _treason_. All he needs to do is retire. I’ll clean up the rest.”

“ _Tony_ ,” says Pepper.

Tony breaks Pepper’s grip and stands, shakier than she’d like but there it is. “You do your job, and I’ll do mine.” She leaves, because there’s no point in hanging around. There’s work to do.

▼

If she’s being honest—and, occasionally, she is—Tony’s been avoiding Rhodey. Everything’s been different since Afghanistan. When he looks at her now, it’s with failure in his eyes—she’s a mission parameter, a casualty, some kind of victim. The soldier boy charm wore off at the same time he looked at her with all that pity, all that guilt.

James Rhodes was never quite a friend, never quite a hookup, never quite a rival, but always a mix of all three. They’d known each other for ages, since Tony pissed off three consecutive military-industry liaisons in a row at the arrogant, obnoxious age of 21 and the Air Force volun-told Rhodes, another young MIT grad, into the role. Tony tried everything she could think of to drive Rhodey away too, including sleeping with him, but it turns out he’s as stubborn as she is. They’re a good match, equals.

Or they were. Until Tony became a failed objective. A female hostage. Until Rhodey said to her, the night of her return home, drunk and weeping and refusing to touch her, _Whatever they did to you, however they… hurt you, it’s my fault_ , and Tony knew. How he saw her, now. The fucking damsel in his hero’s journey, the woman in the refrigerator lending him an air of tragic nobility. Too precious and fragile to even ask directly, as if she’s built to endure a thing but shatter at its name.

If he’d said it out loud. _Rape_. If he’d _asked_. But he just assumed he knew what happened to people like her. Assumed it was the worst thing that could possibly happen to a woman, the culmination of her story.

She’d have told him, if he’d asked. That her virtue, as it were, was well intact. That that’s not what they kidnapped her for—that her kidnappers saw value in her beyond that, even if he doesn’t. That what happened in those caves was worse, because it didn’t happen to _her_. That Ho Yinsen placed his life in her iron hands and she dropped him, and she hasn’t slept through a night since. Maybe she’d even have told him how she got out of the caves. If he’d asked.

All this between them, but he calls, and she picks up. She’s feeling soft for once, generous, basking in the fullness of her own power. The missions have been going very, very well. She delivered humanitarian aid in Gulmira, as herself, the week after she liberated the village; and no one ran from her then, as she clacked in only slightly insensible shoes over the scorched rubble, and she felt no fear. Then she got back in the suit and hunted down the next village, the next villain, the next Stark weapons cache. Pepper’s handling Obie and Tony’s handling the rest. They’re changing the story, changing the world. 

She’s ready to forgive him, maybe, for treating her like a girl.

Or she thinks she is. Until she hears his voice.

“Sorry, who’s this?” she answers, her customary greeting, friendlier than she’s been to him in months.

Rhodey’s voice comes back tight, coiled, vibrating. It’s too loud in her ear as he demands, “What the fuck were you doing in Afghanistan without a military escort?”

He’s _mad_ at her. Of all fucking audacities, _he’s_ mad? Tony’s goodwill evaporates in an instant. He thinks he’s stronger than her, smarter than her, _better_ than her. He thinks _she_ needs _him_ to be safe, as if he wasn’t there when she was taken, as if she didn’t save her fucking self.

Well, Tony’s not a princess in a goddamn tower. She’s a battering ram. She’s the curse itself. She’s the fucking dragon.

“My business,” she says crisply. “My private, civilian business. It’s the Tomorrow Initiative—you’ve seen it, maybe, on the news? Stark’s focusing on clean energy, sustainable crops, making reparations in the parts of the world most damaged by our warmongering. I think a military escort would’ve been highly inappropriate, don’t you?”

“So what, I find out where you are by watching you be reckless on the news? Like the kidnapping never happened—”

“Kidnapping? Which kidnapping—oh, do you mean the time I _had_ a military escort, it got blown up by stolen Stark weapons, and I was taken hostage anyway? That time?” Tony rubs her hand over her face. This is the longest they’ve spoken in months and she’s already exhausted. Softer, less sarcastic, she adds, “I’m paying for the sins of my father, Rhodes, it’s the least reckless thing I’ve ever done in my life.” 

Rhodey lets out a half-mumbled string of curses, and actually it feels so good to finally yell at him, Tony almost laughs.

“If you want to know where I am and what I’m up to, why haven’t you called? I haven’t heard from you.” _Since the night I saved myself and you wouldn’t spend it with me_ , she doesn’t say. It hangs between them. 

All she wanted was a cheeseburger, a press conference, and someone’s arms around her. Not Pepper, anxious and needing comfort, but James, big and solid and capable of holding her together. She wanted to sink into him, to let him memorize all over again the changed shape of her, to come together and come apart, to show her ruined chest with its eternal battery to someone, to confess how scared she’d been, how scared she was still with that shrapnel in her chest and the responsibility of its gift. She wanted something under her hands that wasn’t metal or death. And he was too worried about his idea of who she was to believe her, when she told him she wanted that.

The fight they had instead was _not_ what she wanted. He was such an asshole. She was an asshole back. He left—she threw him out—and she stood in the shower til the hot water ran out, til her skin was pink and scalded, til her bottle of booze was more shower spray and tears than it was whisky, and when she got out the arc reactor glowed at her in the fogged-up mirror and she thought she’d never seen anything so ugly. She thought it was proof she’d never be whole again, and there was no one there to tell her otherwise. 

“I didn’t think you wanted me to,” Rhodes says. Again, this argument is so absurd and so absurdly overdue, it’s hard not to laugh.

Because what happened instead was the very next day, she started designing a better battery. One that could power something big for more than ten minutes. One that looked less like the shrapnel in her chest. And it was Pepper she revealed it to, Pepper she stripped down and showed her ruined cleavage to, Pepper whose careful hands changed out her heart. Pepper who told her the arc reactor proved something different.

She doesn’t feel very angry anymore. “You’ve been a pain in the ass since the day we met, Rhodes. Since when do you care if I want to be bothered?”

There’s that silence again, that space he’s filling with her victimhood. God, she wants to tell him. God, she wants him to ask.

“I thought for sure you’d call me when that drone started taking out Ten Rings terror cells,” she baits him. _Please, please ask_. If she tells him about Iron Man—if she tells him what’s she done—if he sees how strong she is, how strong she’s always been, that what she needs him for is not what he ever thought she needed—

“You and I both know a drone couldn’t do that,” Rhodey answers, and for the first time, his voice sounds like his own again: quick, sharp, crabby, kind. A little suspicious. “Do you know something? Because we’re closing in on that thing. We’re going to blow it from the sky first chance we get, Tony, and we aren’t going to miss. So if you know something, I need to know that something.”

Tony does laugh, now. Some of the tension melts out of her. She missed him. She hates to admit it, but there it is. “Like you stormtroopers can aim. I’m not worried. If I had something to do with that drone, that is, I wouldn’t be worried.”

“You and I both know it’s not a drone,” Rhodes says, a warning tone in his voice, and it feels so good to play with him again, to piss him off for the joy of it, to hear him getting irritated instead of treating her like a china doll—it feels so good to tease him with the idea she might be capable of something marvelous. Just like she used to be.

“If I did know something,” she muses, smiling without effort for the first time in she doesn’t know how long, “I wouldn’t just _tell_ you.”

“ _Tony_ , for Christ’s sake—”

“Dinner would help,” she interrupts. “Dinner, and I’m gonna need a favor.”

Rhodey sighs. “I’m free Wednesday,” he says.

Tony’s going to be in Hong Kong on Wednesday, but he’s the last person she’s about to say that to. “Check again,” Tony says. “I’m pretty sure you’re free tonight.”

▼

She allows herself to be flown to Hong Kong in her private plane, the one with the sake warmers and the dancing pole she installed to unnerve her father’s associates, the business partners she inherited along with the blood on her hands. It rankles, packing her own wings in the belly of the plane and shuttling herself along like a parcel, but Rhodey’s favor is only valid if _whatever you’re doing, you do it outside of U.S. airspace_ , so here she is.

She told Rhodes—hinted, really—that she may have consulted on the Iron Man technology. ( _You’re calling it the Iron Man?_ Rhodey had snorted into his drink. _No, no, it’s cute. Really strikes fear in the heart. It’s not what I’d name a war machine is all I’m saying._ ) That she was not at liberty to disclose. That there may have been a State Department contract involved. And she told Rhodes there was a test, of sorts, happening this week in Hong Kong. And, crucially, if he could just get the USAF off her back, by the end of the week everything would be out in the open.

There was a moment, at the end of dinner. They were both a little drunk, bubbly with their reconnection, the letting go of long-held tension, being _friends_ again. He’s always so handsome, Rhodes, that Tony considers it personally unfair. And though the thing between them has never been magnetic, never been tense-and-release like with Pepper, though it’s always been bold and clashing and joyously without strings, always _easy_ , that moment was a tense one. She felt the distance between them stretch to its full elasticity, and it would have been easy to snap. Rhodes looked at her with something soft, deep, and unknowable in his eyes; they tipped towards each other, heads pressed at the lip of a gravity well; and Tony said _I should probably call it a night._ And maybe he knew she was lying about Iron Man. Maybe he still thought of her as in need of his protection. Maybe he simply didn’t want her anymore. For whatever reason, where he used to be present, he didn’t show up. He didn’t push, he wasn’t bold. Rhodey let her go.

So anyway. The plane lands in Hong Kong, she steps onto foreign soil, she doesn’t put on the suit. Obadiah hasn’t accepted their terms yet. There’s some rustling from the board, like somehow they still think a coup is possible, like they think they can steal Tony’s future out from under her. This is something Tony Stark needs to be seen to do.

There’s a driver waiting for her at the airport, of course, in a cargo van instead of the usual Benz. She oversees the suit being loaded into the back and buckles herself in. This is an official visit, Ms. Stark checking in on one of her factories; except, of course, no one ever told her this factory existed. She dug up the holding through one of Obadiah’s shell corporation accounts, was very surprised indeed to see her name on the business license. She doesn’t know what to expect when she gets there—nuclear warheads and thugs? Nice, honest people making a living in an American factory, just as much stooges in this as she’s been? The full force of the Ten Rings?—but she’s spoken to the factory foreman and asked him to give his people the day off. Insisted, really. Anyone who’s there when she shows up for her ‘inspection,’ well, they probably aren’t nice, innocent people making a living. Still, she’ll _try_ not to blow them up. 

Tony’s all nerves when she arrives at the factory. She waits til the driver has disappeared from sight—she wishes she could have brought Happy, or told anyone what she was doing, or be anything but all alone—and begins setting up. The foreman is coming to give her a tour, she couldn’t talk him out of it, so she has to work fast. She unpacks a crate of drones, arms them, and loads in their programmed sequence. They’ll find somewhere to hover, scan for life signs, and wait for her remote signal. The Iron Man suit is trickier; she can’t put it on now; she has to get the timing just right. Tony Stark has to be seen here, and so does Iron Man; and no one can be allowed to draw the obvious connection.

Shutting down terrorists and rescuing civilians was one thing. Those missions didn’t scare her. She built her suit to withstand Stark ordnance and beyond, so she was pretty confident—cocky, even—that they’d have nothing to hit her with she couldn’t handle. There were innocent lives on the line and bad guys to kill, and she didn’t have to think much about it. She was a good guy. She did what good guys do. 

Blowing up her own factory isn’t so straightforward. The best she can do is cut off the supply flowing directly into enemy hands. So she’ll vaporize Obie’s secret source and have carried out the logical next step of her mission. It’s just that today, arguably, _she’s_ the terrorist putting civilians at risk, and rather than moral superiority her only comfort is knowing no one has a bigger suit to come and shut _her_ down with.

The drones are pinging back to her with no life signs, no stray custodial staff or employees who didn’t get the mandatory holiday memo. She gets feed in her Jarvis-enhanced sunglasses of a Range Rover approaching the gates—that’ll be the foreman, or the scariest guy the Ten Rings could come up with, or both. She leaves the safety of her suit behind, the pneumatic door of its travel crate cracked open, and strides out to meet him. Showtime.

A big man gets out of the passenger side of the Range Rover, a magnanimous smile on his face. He’s got a powerful body and a jolly countenance, and he doesn’t appear to be Chinese. Tony pulls up the personnel records she’s hacked into and projects them on her glasses; the photo for the foreman of this factory doesn’t match the man before her.

“Ms. Stark!” he greets her happily. She can’t place his accent. Eastern European, maybe? How do all thugs have the same regional accent? Are they bred in a special province? “We have been eagerly anticipating your visit.”

“You know, that’s strange, because I didn’t know I was coming myself until very recently,” she smiles back. “You aren’t the man I spoke to on the phone, are you?”

“Mr. Stane told us to expect you,” he beams, steadily advancing on her. There are probably three different ways to kill a man with the high heels Tony’s wearing, but to be honest she’s been slacking on her hand-to-hand training in favor of tinkering with the robotics of the suit’s powered exoskeleton. She takes a step back, her heel catching on the pavement, and tries to hide her stumble. He’s much, much bigger than she is.

“Oh, that Obie,” Tony says, still smiling. “He’s always a step ahead, isn’t he?”

“Without him, we wouldn’t have all this,” the man gestures expansively at the manufacturing compound.

Tony’s still backing up, shrinking before his bulk, probably looking insubstantial as crepe paper in her smart suit. “Sorry, I don’t think I caught your name?” she asks. It doesn’t matter, really, but she’s a little hung up on the fact that this is the _second_ person Obadiah’s hired to kill her. Honestly. If she was a man, he would have shown her the respect of murdering her in person. But this is so classic Obie: ever since she was a child, her dad’s brilliant right-hand man and business partner didn’t have time for her.

It’s about time he regretted it.

“You may call me Mr. Bishop,” the man offers. Tony hears the sound of a car door slamming. “Ah, and that will be Mr. Rook.”

Tony curses under her breath. It’s going to take a minute to get out of this ridiculous suit and into the other, and the system will need at least 20 seconds to initialize. She’s not going to be much faster than anyone on the fucking chessboard in these shoes.

If she dies here today, like this, it will be no different from dying in the caves. No one will know who she really was. No one will know what became of her. No one will know what she became. 

“Charmed, I’m sure,” she quips uselessly, and kicks her shoe in his direction as hard as possible. He flinches back, dodging a flying Louboutin, and she grazes his forehead with the second one. He lunges after her as she turns and runs. She’s got a repulsor palm cannon cupped in her hand, but it’s the slimline model she’s been tinkering with, and it doesn’t pack much of a punch. She waits til she’s through the front door of the factory and then blasts the doorframe behind her twice in rapid succession. The first shot cracks the cement across the huge ceiling and showers her with concrete dust; the second shifts the weight of the doorframe, jamming the door. There are a million ways in, but that doesn’t matter. All she needs is Iron Man. 

She hears glass breaking across the factory, stripping out of her jacket as she runs. She skids to a halt in front of the suit and struggles out of her dumb slacks and into the Iron Man’s embrace. Jarvis sends a code to activate the drone sequence. She hears shouts and footsteps not far behind her, and it’s hard to stay present and not slip back to the cave as she waits for the system to initialize. It’s only seconds, she tells herself. She measures her breaths. You can’t choke on smoke that’s not really there.

There’s a bad moment, then. Time slows to molasses. Stane’s thugs reach her before the suit’s up and running; they hang frozen between large machines, staring up at all six feet, six inches of her better half. She’s too heavy to move without power, so she’s frozen there, really viscerally _aware_ of how easily a suit of armor becomes a tomb.

“What the fuck?” Rook asks Bishop. “Where’d Stark go?”

That’s when she realizes they think they’re just looking at another prototype, another machine. The suit cycles up with a delicious hum, and the lights flick on, angular eyes and chestplate glowing ice-blue. “Hello, boys,” she says, and she’s never heard anything sweeter than Iron Man’s voice. Before they can even piss themselves with fright, she’s in motion; she is motion, a pirouette by a powerhouse, violence flowing like water from her superpowered limbs. Repulsor to the chest sends Rook flying backwards through the door he just walked through; Bishop relished the fear he made her feel, so he gets extra, he gets his ribs broken all-at-once as she lifts him like he’s nothing and drives her knee up into his chest. She casts him aside. He leaves a streak of blood on the ground where he slides, his head flopping like a doll’s.

Disappointing. Can it be over already? She’s excited, almost, when the gunshot pings off her shoulder. Rook is up again, coming at her with his handgun, and she laughs. She crosses the room in a few powered steps and crushes the gun, and his hand on the grip, in her palm. Rook screams as his hand pulps, struggling to get away, but his wrist bone holds; he’s not going anywhere, unless he gnaws his way free from this iron trap. Tony’s laughing, still. They’re ants, they’re less than ants, they’re motes of dust, they’re nothing. _This_ is what Obadiah sent to stop her? Oh, if he’d known what she was capable of. If any of them had fucking believed in her for one second. She can make a much bigger weapon than he ever thought to sell. She can _become_ one.

The man twists, kicking out uselessly at her unyielding armor. She squeezes harder, feeling the fine bones of his hand grind and snap. “I want you to know, I’m trying to get out of the business of killing,” she tells him. “But we both know what happens if you leave here alive. You report back to your boss about what you saw here today.” She draws him closer, shoving her flat metal face up close to his sweaty one. The reflected light from her eyes makes his fear gleam. Enjoying it, she growls, “And that would ruin the surprise.”

“No—” Rook opens his mouth to protest, and Tony shoots him point-blank in the face with a repulsor blast. She unclenches her fist and lets him drop limp to the factory floor.

“No lifesigns detected,” Jarvis says in her ear.

She turns to deal with the other, only he’s not where she left him. There’s a blood smear on the floor and no thug lying in it. That’s the moment she hears the first explosion—her drones are firing on the factory. The weapons factory, the one overflowing with volatile chemicals, combustible materials, and a non-negligible amount of uranium. It’s showtime.

Iron Man busts through the ceiling, flies into the air above the factory. She hopes her non-combat drones are getting good pictures of this; she’s gone to too much trouble to set this scene not to leak photos of it. She poses prettily, hanging in the air, then starts blasting the hell out of the drones, careful not to damage them before they can land their hits. She’s here to look like a hero while she destroys her own factory. 

And—maybe Tony needs to be reminded she’s supposed to be a hero. Maybe Tony needs proof she made it out of that cave to save the world, not just to murder people whose ideologies she disagrees with. Maybe Tony needs a little bit of accountability, a little bit of transparency.

Because killing someone who points a gun at her feels really, really good.

It’s a real fourth of July display, rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air, as she really lets the suit open up, run its paces, show off. There’s no reason to hold back when she’s the one in control. It’s almost a dance, swirling around the drones, projectiles singing through the air in every direction. She thought nothing would ever feel better than using the suit to work justice, to punish those who have used Stark tech to do terrible harm; but everyone uses weapons to do harm. That’s the point of them. It feels so much better to fly above this inert slab of machinery and rock, opening her full arsenal in the name of _preventing_ harm in the first place. Not vengeance, but good old fashioned making the world a better place.

Then a massive explosion as something unexpectedly volatile is struck by one of her repulsor blasts knocks her from the air. As she plummets through the collapsing building, the concrete floor opening up to meet her, a piece of rebar comes down like a comet’s tail, landing on her back. She’s pinned, and that’s when something smashes into her faceplate. At first she thinks it’s more debris, and there’s a concern she really might be buried here if the walls come down too quickly; then she’s hit again in the exact same place, wrenching her head and sending her visual display into pixeled static. The suit strains to twist its neck and there, above her, is Mr. Bishop, bloody and listing, gripping a metal rod he’s found somewhere. The rod smashes down again and again, showering her head and neck with blows, and her display fritzes in and out, her brain similarly threatening to drop into protective shut-down as it batters against her skull.

“Stay—down—you—bitch,” Bishop huffs through gritted teeth, swinging with the whole of his burly strength onto the flexible joints of the neck, one of the weaker parts of the suit, and the faceplate. Tony’s trapped facedown, her hands useless beneath rubble, and the stabilizing thrusters of her boots are pointed in the wrong direction to do anything but send her headfirst into an already swaying load-bearing wall. More explosions fill the air with racket and smoke, and there’s not much time. Bishop is clearly prepared to die here, as long as he takes her with him. You could admire the man’s work ethic under other circumstances.

The thing is, Tony really hates that word.

Well, everybody gets crushed to death sooner or later, right? She charges up, a high-pitched ping of building energy, and lets loose a full-strength blast from her chest repulsor. The blast throws her into the air—her arm, wrenching from under the rebar, comes half a beat later—and sends Bishop flying in the other direction, in _any_ direction, so long as it’s not hers. The building is coming down and she’s not going with it. 

Tony jets crookedly into the air, flailing, and stabilizes wildly, not thinking about the way her head feels like ground meat, and rises above the factory like a drunken bird. The building rumbles a massive complaint beneath her and caves in. All around it, supply sheds and outbuildings are heaps of twisted metal and broken glass, concrete and brick spilled loose like child’s building blocks, licked by the wet sort of flame that comes from burning napalm.

Tony looks down into the ruins, the last of Obadiah’s dark dealings crackling and burning inside. She laughs or exhales or does both. It’s done; she’s done it. No more evil will be wrought in the name of Stark. Who knows how much good she has yet to do?

Slowly, her whole body made of hurt, Tony lands in the least burning section of the wreckage she can find and crawls out of it, surprised by the blood sheeting from her hairline down her face, by the useless way her arm flops without the powered suit to hold it. The air feels unbearably intimate against her skin, her limbs so feebly held together—an internal skeleton is not nearly enough. Though maybe that’s just the concussion. Her helmet padding plainly needs work. 

She programs the suit to pilot itself to a discreet storage area beneath the parking garage of her hotel and staggers out of the rubble, wearing her torn white blouse from earlier over the conductive bodysuit that goes beneath her armor. Luckily, emergency workers and a fair number of rubberneckers have gathered on the scene, attracted by the light show and its inherent violence, and a paramedic wraps her in an emergency blanket before anyone gets too good a look at her clothes. Jarvis has summoned her driver, so she refuses comment to the press and disappears behind the tinted windows of the big car, where she promptly passes out and bleeds all over the emergency blanket.

▼

That night she gets a call from Pepper around 10 o’clock, making it 6am in Los Angeles. Tony’s got ice packs covering most of her body, a temporary cast on her arm, and enough muscle relaxers in her system that she’s feeling _very_ good, even though it hurts to lift her martini. 

“Pepper, my fav’rite human!” she gushes. Slurs. Gushes. “You rilly _do_ care abo’ me.”

“Do you have a concussion right now? You’d better not be drinking,” Pepper snaps, instead of the greeting Tony feels she deserves.

“Hardly counts as drinking,” Tony mutters, glaring at her distant martini with longing. There’s no way in hell she can reach the bedside table right now.

“I saw you on the _news_ ,” Pepper is saying. “A building collapsed on you, Tony! What the hell are you doing in Hong Kong?”

“Your energy is rilly _up_ ri’ now. I need it _down_. Can you bring it _down_ with meesh? Me?”

“You have two seconds to convince me you’re okay or I’m getting on a plane. No, you know what? Here’s what we’ll do. You’ve lost jet privileges. From now on, you file flight plans with me in advance, and I will approve them at my discretion,” Pepper rattles on, patently ignoring Tony’s request.

“Y’ can’t do that,” she protests.

“CEO,” says Pepper. “I can do fucking anything.”

“Okay, tha’s hot. Tha’s rilly hot, Pep— _Pepper_.”

“Tony?”

“Peep. Pepper.”

“It wasn’t you in the suit. It was a coincidence that you were there at the same time that—that thing was there.”

“Iron Man,” Tony corrects.

“It wasn’t you in the suit and there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this. Right?” 

“Shure,” Tony agrees.

Pepper sighs. She sounds like she’s in pain. She should really try muscle relaxers. Tony would tell her so, but there’s a helluva lot of tricky sounds in that sentence. Maybe after a bracing sip of her martini she could manage it. “Tony, I need to hear you say it.” 

Tony can’t help it. Pepper is the funniest person she’s ever met. She starts giggling and she can’t stop. It would actually be great if Pepper got on a plane right now. She is going to need some _help_ with her luggage tomorrow. There’s just—there’s just no way.

“Tony, this is serious. I need this from you.”

“Nee’ me to say it, or nee’ it to be true?”

Pepper does another one of those sighs.

“Okay, okay,” Tony rushes. “I’m not in the shuit. Shit. Suit. I mean, Pepper. Are you rilly asking me if I’m—if I’m _Iron Man_?”

She tries to make it sound preposterous, but honestly, Tony’s a shit liar, always has been. If she was bad at poker, she’d always lose. Luckily she’s amazing at poker. The trick to being truly outrageous is to always be telling the truth, no matter what you’re claiming. It’s easy to seem like the smartest, most interesting person in any given room when you _are_.

“I’m calling the hotel. Okay? Someone is going to be at your room in ten minutes. Five minutes. If they can’t unlock the door, Tony, they’re going to break it down. Stop drinking, and don’t go to sleep. I’ve registered your flight plans with HKG Air Control; you leave at dawn. We will talk about this tomorrow.”

“So hot when you sound like a mom,” Tony says. “Like, not _my_ mom. Jus’ _a_ mom. Like any mom—”

Sometime around then Pepper hangs up on her, as Pepper is wont to do. She’s only got five minutes, so she figures she’d better hustle if she wants to make it to that martini.

▼

In the morning, she doesn’t really remember what she and Pepper discussed, but she knows by reflex Pepper’s not going to be happy with her. But when she calls on the way to the airport, Pepper doesn’t answer. 

“Wow, is this what your voicemail sounds like? I didn’t think you’d even have a voicemail. I don’t think you have _ever_ not picked up my call before. Do you not pick up calls sometime? Like a normal person instead of a Pepper? Wow.” There’s a long pause while she tries to figure out what she’s done and what Pepper most likely wants her to say. “Wait. You’re not _screening_ me, are you? Fuck. Whatever I said last night, Pepper, there were muscle relaxers involved. I may not have adhered to the recommended dosage, you know how I like to tinker. Anyway, my point is—”

Pepper’s voicemail cuts her off before she manages to say anything worth saying at all, so Tony switches to text.

_I’m sorry, is what I tried to say in my voicemail. For whatever I did. You are the last person I want to cause distress for. Call me back?_

Not fifteen seconds later, Jarvis dings with Pepper’s response. _Are you Iron Man? Because I can’t be around you if you’re going to be running around like one woman can save the world all by herself and nearly getting yourself killed every other week. I’ll quit._

_You’re the CEO, you can’t quit,_ Tony texts back.

_Per our discussion, I can do fucking anything._

Tony waits, hoping that her words will spark some kind of memory, but all she gets is a generalized sense of shame. She tries calling again and it goes straight to voicemail.

_Pepper, I don’t know what you want me to say here_ , she sends.

Pepper’s response is immediate. _I want you to tell me the truth_.

“But you don’t,” Tony murmurs to herself in the back of the car. “And I can’t tell it.”

So she texts, _Press conference when I get home. Please arrange it. Thx_ and follows it with three pepper emojis, hoping this is charming. They’re still twenty minutes from the airport, but Tony goes ahead and switches her cell service off. There’s nothing left to say.

▼

Pepper’s still not speaking to her, but it happens more than you’d think. Rhodey agrees to come with her instead. Tony’s been talking to the press on her own since before she could drive, but today she needs the credibility.

Rhodes walks her to the podium, back straight, and it looks good, so Tony tries to copy. Her high heels are unforgiving on her limp, her makeup team not up to the task of concealing _this_ many facial contusions and leaving her with a remotely normal skin tone under TV lights. That plus her arm’s still in a sling. She needs all the reflected dignity she can get.

She has the cards for her prepared speech in hand—Pepper sent them over by courier, if you can credit that level of passive aggression—but with the sling, they’re worse than useless. She tucks them into the pocket of her blazer and winces out at the press. She almost died this time, and she’s the only one who knows it. Anyway, now she knows more about the suit’s specs, staying airborne during concussive blasts, and reinforced neck plating, so that’s the win here. That and the ten megatons of Stark warheads she destroyed. Win-win, basically. It’s Pepper’s own stubbornness that she refuses to see it that way.

“Many of you have questions, I’m sure,” Tony begins, and like piranhas scenting blood—perhaps literally, that cut on her eyebrow is starting to feel leaky—the press erupt into frenzy. “Some of which I hope to answer here today. The attack on our overseas production plant—” the one Obadiah built in secret, without her knowledge, the better to deal arms under the table, with an unknown quantity of Tony’s own shareholders and a crime organization called the Ten Rings in on the scheme—“was very nearly devastating. But I’m proud to say that Iron Man subverted the worst of the attack, and no lives were lost.” Or the footage convincingly looks that way, she hopes. She programmed the enemy drones to put on a good show, and fuck, she’s got the injuries to prove they did their part.

This is the first official acknowledgment of Iron Man, after he’s dominated the media cycle for weeks, since the missions started. The reporters are vibrating out of their chairs like unattended dildos. Tony hesitates before the next lie. It kills her to say it. More than anything, her life has been about proving what she’s capable of. But what would come of Iron Man, of global fucking peace, if she lifted that faceplate and the whole world saw _it’s a girl_? She’d be dismissed, just like she’s always been. No one would fear Iron Man anymore. Instead of the bigger gun, she’d be the punchline. Terorrism would resume, Obadiah’s cronies would oust her from the board for good, and her vision, her mission, would fail. 

She’d be back in that cave, helpless in every way that mattered, with no knight of shining armor to get her out.

So she opens her mouth and says, “The truth is, Iron Man is my bodyguard.”

The crowd goes fucking wild. Rhodey steps up to the mic, puts his big hands on her shoulders. “After the incident this spring, I gave Ms. Stark my very strongest recommendation she upgrade her personal security. The Iron Man is the realization of that recommendation. Some people, you know, they sleep with a baseball bat under their bed. Tony hires a superhero.”

“The important thing,” Tony cuts in, over a roar of questions about whether the Air Force oversaw the development of Iron Man, if Rhodes is the pilot, and if he isn’t who is, “is that I’m safe, Stark Industries and our investors are safe, and America’s safe. There will be no comment on my bodyguard’s identity at this time. Just rest assured he’s the right man to get the job done.”

“As you can see, Ms. Stark is a little shaken up by her injuries sustained while visiting the Stark production site in Hong Kong. Let’s let her rest, and in the meantime, I’ll be happy to answer any questions I can.” Rhodes delivers the lines they agreed on and seems to buy them wholesale, lines to play into public perception of her femininity and inherent damsel-ness, lines to dispel suspicion about her obvious lies, but she resents him for it anyway. How easy it is, in just a few words, to make her seem entirely weak. How strong and noble he looks in comparison as he says it. 

Rhodes ushers her off the stage, and Happy takes her elbow as she steps down. Ushered from man to man like an invalid: now there’s a story the public can swallow. Maybe it was unnecessary to even pretend. She thought it was so transparent, this cover story about a ‘visit’ to the secret factory on the very same day a ‘terrorist strike’ wiped it off the face of the earth, Tony and Iron Man there at the same time yet never quite appearing together... But as she’s swept behind the scenes of her own press conference and Rhodey occupies the stage with natural authority, calm and confident and preposterously handsome in his uniform, she wonders if anyone would have believed the truth. If she could have stood in front of the world and said “I _am_ Iron Man.” If anyone would have listened.

But Iron Man has enemies out there. Tony Stark has enemies. World peace has enemies. It’s time to take advantage of her natural invisibility, to shrink out of the limelight for the first time in her hungry life.

“It’s okay,” she mutters to herself, trying to smooth out her tightly clenched fists. “This is the plan. This is the plan working. The world doesn’t need Tony Stark. The world needs Iron Man.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” a mild voice answers her. Tony about jumps off her high heels. He’s so bland looking, from his sandy hair to his pressed suit, she didn’t even notice him. He sticks out his hand to shake and offers a truly forgettable smile, a man with more experience than Tony with fading out of attention and memory. “I’m Agent Coulson. I think you’ll find we have a meeting.”

Tony goes with him. After all, her mission is done. The last of Obadiah’s work is dismantled. The Stark legacy is back in her hands. All that’s left is to decide what she wants to do with it. 

▼▼▼

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading, loves! Let me know what you hope and dream for in the sequel, and I'll see you all for Iron Man 2, my controversial fave. <3


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